The importance of emotion in risk perception has been well documented in field and experimental studies. However, little is known about its role in everyday life. On thirty occasions over ten consecutive working days, ninety-four participants were prompted at random - via mobile telephones - to...

Whereas people are typically thought to be better off with more choices, studies show that they often prefer to choose from small as opposed to large sets of alternatives. We propose that satisfaction from choice is an inverted U-shaped function of the number of alternatives. This proposition is...

The mathematical representation of Brunswik's lens model has been used extensively to study human judgment and provides a unique opportunity to conduct a meta-analysis of studies that covers roughly five decades. Specifically, we analyze statistics of the lens model equation (Tucker, 1964)...

The experiential sampling method (ESM) was used to collect data from 74 part-time students who described and assessed the risks involved in their current activities when interrupted at random moments by text messages. The major categories of perceived risk were short-term in nature and involved...

Research on judgment and decision making presents a confusing picture of human abilities. For example, much research has emphasized the dysfunctional aspects of judgmental heuristics, and yet, other findings suggest that these can be highly effective. A further line of research has modeled...

It is well accepted that people resist evidence that contradicts their beliefs. Moreover, despite their training, many scientists reject results that are inconsistent with their theories. This phenomenon is discussed in relation to the field of judgment and decision making by describing four...

An important problem faced by boundedly rational agents is to identify 'regions of rationality,' i.e., the areas for which simple, boundedly rational models are and are not effective. To map the contours of such regions, we derive probabilities that models identify the best of m alternatives (m ...

When can a single variable be more accurate in binary choice than multiple sources of information? We derive, analytically, the probability that a single variable (SV) will correctly predict one of two choices when both criterion and predictor are continuous variables. We further provide...

People experience difficulty in facing tradeoffs in multi-attribute choice. However, to what extent do they need to face these tradeoffs explicitly? We examine choices by simple tradeoff - avoiding models in environments where "true" preferences are linear and attributes are characterized by...

The effectiveness of decision rules depends on characteristics of both rules and environments. A theoretical analysis of environments specifies the relative predictive accuracies of the lexicographic rule "take-the-best" (TTB) and other simple strategies for binary choice. We identify three...